[ceceron]

I totally agree. MiniZinc is a great tool to prototype solvers for combinatorial optimization problems. It's mature (but still growing) and has support for many different solvers, not only from the Constraint Programming/SAT family. You can easily switch to MIP solvers (like Gurobi) or even try some local search approaches.

It has very good documentation, reasonable IDE and AFAIK three great courses on Coursera for beginners. I have been teaching it myself[1] and all my students were amazed how quickly one can develop a working prototype for real-life industrial problems.

[1] https://gitlab.com/agh-courses/2021-2022/constraint-programm...